


Friends, Family, or Lovers

by amporasbitch



Category: DRAMAtical Murder (Visual Novel), DRAMAtical Murder - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, Child Abuse, Child Death, Childhood, Dysfunctional Family, Gen, Origin Story, more or less
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-01
Updated: 2017-06-01
Packaged: 2018-11-07 20:25:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11066484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amporasbitch/pseuds/amporasbitch
Summary: Who were Virus and Trip before they were Virus and Trip? What happened to them to make them who they are - or were they always twisted inside? Perhaps their story went something like this.





	Friends, Family, or Lovers

**Author's Note:**

> This is my (a bit late) fic for the DMMD Big Bang! It will eventually have a companion art piece with it, but the artist isn't finished yet. I just didn't want to sit on this for too much longer, especially since it's been almost two years (!!) since I last posted any fics. I really like Virus and Trip as characters, and it was fun trying to figure out what they might've experienced or what their parents were like to make them into the assholes we know and love. It was a pretty good creative exercise, honestly I really like how this came out, and I hope you guys do, too!

The pregnancy was uneventful, as was the birth. Virus came mundanely in such a way that it nearly seemed intentional, as if he didn’t think of birth as something worth celebrating or overstating, despite being a newborn. The doctor scarcely saw babies do anything other than scream themselves red in the face when they were born, unless something was wrong with them. But Virus was not like that. He seemed to cry just enough, scream just enough, squirm just enough so as not to raise concern about his health. It was as if the child might have simply been silent and still, not deigning to kick up a fuss, if he’d had his way. A peculiar infant indeed, thought the doctor, as peculiar as a healthy infant could be. The parents didn’t see it, however, or perhaps they didn’t care. These were not normal parents, not normal people; fitting, given that the infant would not become a normal child.

The woman was difficult to please, and easily bored. She moved from one new fascination to another like a leaf in the wind. When she met the man, she quickly got bored with small talk. Then she was bored with deep and meaningful conversations, bored with typical physical intimacy, bored with being a girlfriend, and so far she had yet to be bored of being a wife, choosing instead to be bored of being childless. The man was more than a hapless husband, however. He was an intelligent man, whose occupation was as a higher-up in a lucrative business, but he was far from honest about his dealings. He made promises to clients with no intention of fulfilling them, knowing that there’d be little to no way of them going against the company and getting their deals nulled. He cared little about the lives he ruined, the businesses that went under, so long as it didn’t reach back around to the company he worked for. Most times, it didn’t. The rare times it threatened to do so, he had his ways of avoiding the trouble, like offering bribes or allowing for minimal negotiation. He’d be fired if his employer ever discovered what he was doing, but he was too cunning to be caught. And thus, it was these two people that created Virus. Time would tell which parent Virus took after more strongly.

Virus was not the name put on his birth certificate, nor was it the name that his parents referred to him as. But soon enough it would become his name, and after a while the new name would reach back into the past and capture memories, changing the words. Virus, therefore, was always Virus, even at his moment of birth. Names aside, Virus was simply an infant then, with no knowledge of what a name was, or what his own name could be. And if he had been able to approach the subject the same way he did his own birth, one could assume that he would care very little what his parents called him.

This odd family made up of a capricious woman, an untrustworthy man, and a strangely calm baby soon left the hospital without incident.

~~~

As Virus grew, it was near impossible to tell which parent Virus more closely resembled physically. His hair grew in blonde, his eyes turned dark blue, but that proved nothing one way or the other, as both his parents shared those traits. Soon enough, however, his soft jawline revealed that more of his mother had immediately thrust its way into Virus’s appearance. But his personality was much more equally influenced by each parent’s genes.

Right away, it was clear that the child was intelligent. Virus learned to speak faster than most children do, and seemed to understand ideas and concepts about the world without prior explanation by either parent. His mother figured it was his intelligence coming through and nothing more, but his father wondered if perhaps the child had overheard the conversations they had both with each other in person and with friends and coworkers over the phone. It would make sense that this child, adept at sneaking around and learning on his own, would be his father’s son. But the man was dishonest, often by omission, and he said nothing, choosing to agree with his wife that mere intelligence gave Virus his knowledge, not his new-formed cunning.

Although, it truthfully seemed more apt to say that Virus was his mother’s son as he grew older. For not only did his face resemble hers, but parts of her personality filtered into the boy. Including the part of her that was near-endlessly bored, always craving excitement, sticking with one thing until the fun was gone and then leaving it behind. While it could be said that most, if not all children, behave in this way, it seemed different in Virus. When Virus became bored with a new toy, he did not simply discard it and leave it to collect dust in the back of his bedroom closet. Rather, he would destroy it.

Action figures were torn limb from limb and left scattered across the floor, race cars were banged against a table until they were dented beyond recognition, a stuffed animal was even set on fire and charred by a match that Virus shouldn’t have been able to obtain, given that they were kept on such a high shelf. The mother quickly lost patience and decided that perhaps her son wasn’t being given the right kinds of toys for him. In an attempt to deter the destruction and the risk it contained, she gave her son a Barbie doll. While Virus played with the doll a lot longer than he had played with his toys before, she too suffered a grisly fate, perhaps the worst of all. It was the father who found her in the bathroom at the bottom of the toilet, weighed there by a small rock from the backyard bound to her ankles by a yellow twist tie, which the father assumed to have come from a bag of bread that had lost its tie the day before.

The mother, conversely to her child, was not becoming bored. She was becoming frazzled. She hadn’t expected a child to be such a problem, to be so bizarre. She was far from bored, but she found that she would almost have preferred to be bored instead of so incredibly stressed. The father was also put off by his son’s odd behavior, but not near as much as his wife. On the contrary, he was interested to see how far it could go, what the child would do next, what he would become. The man had planned on keeping his dirty dealings a secret from his child forever, but if Virus continued to be cold and ruthless as he got older than perhaps the man could have a partner in crime after all. But of course, he’d have to find out how the boy interacted with people. And the best way to do so would be to see how the boy did in school.

~~~

Virus’s first, and consequently only year of schooling, was in nursery school at age four. There was not much learning to be done outside of memorizing the alphabet and counting up to ten, which the child quickly became adept at. On the whole, as his parents predicted, he was an excellent student. However, the other purpose of nursery school, the development of social skills and formation of friendships, was not fully realized by the boy. He appeared to get along with the other children well enough at first. He obliged them, played with them, shared toys, everything that was expected of him. But much like his half-hearted squirming at birth, he seemed only to do these things because he knew he must. He would much rather have ignored the other children at best, or tormented them at worst. This was more than a secret, private hunch, this was a stark truth that quickly became evident. First, in the friends he chose, if one could call them friends. He associated with the troublesome children, the ones who wouldn’t listen to teachers, the ones who bullied other kids. Not in an admiring way, as a more naïve, misguided child would do, but in a comradely way, as if the boy saw like-mindedness between him and the other child. Virus was an equal in these relationships, sometimes a superior. Although he chose friends because he was required, he still endeavored to choose them carefully, and not just any child would do as a friend. But that was not the only issue, for if it was, his parents might simply have chalked it up to the child needing better role models and more guidance. No, it escalated.

As malicious as Virus was with his toys, he was even crueler to the other children, even in tandem with some of them. In each relationship he fostered, he was first the instigator. A quiet one, urging his partner into bigger and riskier escapades, which the boy himself either watched from the sidelines or happily participated in himself. Later on, however, the need to instigate would vanish, and Virus needed only to be a silent partner, allowing his playmate to come up with bigger and better schemes and take Virus along for the ride. When caught, Virus was excellent at deflecting blame, making himself appear non-complicit in whatever deed he had directly or indirectly done. At first the other child always took the fall, but cracks soon appeared in the façade. It didn’t take long for the teacher to realize that common variable in every incident was Virus. The incidents themselves ranged from threatening letters stuffed in a child’s backpack, rat poison pellets in another child’s lunch box, and a bludgeoned squirrel on the playground, not to mention the fate of the class hamster. The poor thing had been drowned in the boy’s bathroom, over the weekend break no less, left to rot in the third-stall toilet until its waterlogged, partially decomposed body was discovered by a student. The teacher knew it had to have been Virus’s doing, for the child’s partner in crime at the time had been a girl.

The teacher called an impromptu conference with the boy’s parents to inform them of their son’s behavior. The man and woman had little knowledge of Virus’s school exploits-the child either said nothing or told only the mundane details-but they had suspected that their son might be doing more at school than he let on. So they were rather dismayed, but hardly surprised as the teacher shared with them deed after deed that Virus had committed. But the child was not a lost cause just yet, however, claimed the teacher. He was intelligent, creative, persuasive. He was a charismatic, natural born leader, and had the potential to do something great in the future. But that could only happen if these natural tendencies could be funneled into more benign and constructive pursuits. The teacher advised the parents to help Virus find a hobby or an interest that didn’t involve destruction, and encourage his participation in said activity. If this could be done, the teacher believed, Virus would outgrow his violent and manipulative tendencies, or at least most of them. The parents decided this sounded plausible, and agreed to give it a try.

That night, as the family ate dinner, the woman breached the subject to her son, asking him what sort of things he enjoyed at school. The boy took a moment to answer, as if considering his options. He finally shrugged and said that there was nothing in particular he really enjoyed for very long. The mother understood this sentiment well, and empathized with her child, asking him if there had been any activity or sport he’d been wanting to try. The boy pondered another moment, and slowly said, come to think of it, he’d rather enjoyed the day paint was brought in for his class to finger-paint with. But he also liked the watercolors brought in on a different day, liking the brush instead of fingers, but not liking how light the paint was. The parents both immediately assured Virus that they could buy him paintbrushes and a thicker, more colorful paint than watercolor, to which the child reacted with some excitement. That being said, the child never seemed very excited about anything, this included, but the parents took what they could get. The father, while less happy about this development than the mother, admitted to himself that this was probably for the best. As interesting as Virus was, he took a toll on both parents. Perhaps painting was the ticket to sanity, both that of the parents and the child.

~~~

And it was, for a while. Virus took to his brush set and acrylic paints immediately, creating a new piece every day. They were about as good as one could expect from a child; mostly random splotches of color in indiscriminate patterns, the paint sometimes laid on so thick that it would begin to peel off. The rare times the child attempted to paint people, it was mostly himself, or his parents, or the three of them together. There was never anything disturbing in his artwork, nothing that would cause anyone concern-again, for a while. After a period of time, the drawings became stranger, darker. The color palette shrunk until the bright yellows, greens, and oranges disappeared from Virus’s paintings, and he opted mostly for dark reds, blues, and a lot of black. Worrisome perhaps, but the actual content of the drawings didn’t change, so the parents decided that the child was just experimenting with color.

The incident was preceded, perhaps foreshadowed, by a painting of a big black ball with a red splotch in the center, the whole thing surrounded by blue. It resembled an eye, and it may have been supposed to, but no one thought to ask Virus if that were so. The next day at school, Virus lied to his parents, saying that watercolor was going to be brought in again, and asked to bring his own brushes. The parents allowed it, and unbeknownst to them, the child snuck a tube of red paint into his bag as well. The items went unused until lunch time, when Virus moved them into his lunchbox and asked a friend-a boy he’s gotten into trouble with several times-to eat lunch with him out on the playground, despite that not being allowed. The boy, always eager to break rules, followed Virus out into the playground and into the wooded area beyond. Once they were just out of sight of the school was when the incident began.

The other boy tried to escape, of course, but Virus threatened the child both with a sharp rock beside them and with his own paintbrushes should he try any further. Virus forced the child to eat the contents of the tube of red paint. The tube wasn’t completely full, and the paint wasn’t toxic, but the taste and bizarre texture caused the child to vomit. The whole time, Virus watched with sadistic glee. The other boy, crying, begged to be released, and Virus didn’t let him go until he’d shoved his thickest paintbrush so deep into the boy’s left eye that blood began to fall from the socket. When the boy pulled the brush out of his eye and stumbled back onto the playground, where faculty were looking for him, they were at first glance unable to tell how much of the blood on his face and hands was actually blood at all. His left eye, however, was clearly bleeding for real, the organ itself discolored and leaking fluid, and the socket surrounding it bruised from the force of the brush handle. The boy tearfully spilled out the tale of torture, and the police were called to retrieve Virus from the woods, from which he would not exit. The child’s reputation preceded him, for most of the faculty were familiar with the boy’s exploits after his teacher had shared them in the teacher’s lounge some time before. The police found the boy calmly balancing the bloody paintbrush on his knee, having eaten both his own lunch and the cookie packed in the lunch of the boy he just tortured. Virus complied with the officers’ demands, setting down the paintbrush and allowing himself to be led out of the woods.

~~~

The incident spread through Virus’s community faster than the child was pulled out of school.

He was too young to serve any jail time, and the parents of the other child decided not to press charges, but the damage was done. Doctors confirmed that the injured child would likely never regain full vision in that eye, and it wasn’t long before backlash rained down upon Virus’s parents. They blamed the pair for everything, and why wouldn’t they? How were they to know the kind of child Virus was? They weren’t there when he was born, as calm then as he was when the police led him back to his teacher.

The parents, for their part, could hardly bear it. The mother lashed out at others who criticized her parenting, the father quietly steamed as the news spread to his coworkers. They received little sympathy from anyone. Virus, for his part, didn’t seem to care. He no longer had to go to school, as no other school in the area would enroll him. He spent his time playing, continuing to destroy his toys the way he’d always done. He no longer painted.

After several months, the parents couldn’t take it anymore, and prepared to move away for a fresh start. It was at around this time that a pair of strange men knocked on their door, bearing an even stranger proposition.

“Your child,” they said, “Is quite extraordinary.”

“Ruthless. Cunning. Assertive.”

“Just what we need.”

“We know we’re asking quite a bit, but hasn’t he troubled you enough?”

“He’ll be in good hands. Toue Inc. will take excellent care of him.”

“It’ll be like he never existed.”

Virus watched from the next room as they discussed, as papers were signed, as hands were shaken. He watched with the same impassivity he’d watched the rest of his life go by with. Smart child he was, he quickly gleaned an understanding of what was happening, but he didn’t much care. He was bored with staying in his home with his parents, parents who strained their faces into smiles when they looked at him. It was the falseness of it that irritated him, not the absence of love.

When the strange men spoke earnestly to him, telling him he was to come with them, and how much fun he would have, Virus decided he might as well go with them.

Of course, it wasn’t up to him. His parents had already washed their hands of him in their desperation. The mother was not bored, she was tired. The father thought it a waste, but it could not be helped. Virus was simply too much for them.

The men drove away with Virus, the once-parents drove to a new town, and life resumed once more.

~~~

The wife finally became bored of being a wife.

To her, the husband had failed to appropriately step up after the incident. The only effort he seemed to put into the situation was holding the wife back from catfights, shouting matches, angry phone calls. The incident ignited an angry fire in her. It wasn’t so much in defense of her child; after all, he’d done as worse before, and she had been rather upset with him herself. But she couldn’t stand the attacks on her character, the accusations, the personal insults. She was the one who insisted on moving, whereas the husband had been content to grin and bear it. He was much more pragmatic and inclined to consider the future, and she always lived in the moment. Her endless boredom was proof of this. Thus, she grew bored of being her husband’s wife.

Or, at least, his faithful wife.

Their new next-door neighbor caught her eye almost immediately. He lived alone, and was around the same age as the wife and her husband. From the day they each introduced themselves to each other, the wife was attracted to him. He had stunningly red hair, including a beard, and biting green eyes. He was a beast of a man, tall and muscular. He had an angry streak to him that was clear to all who knew him, but that anger caught the wife’s attention, reminding her of her own unleashed rage.

And so, they were angry together.

The husband worked long hours, longer than usual as he settled into the rhythm of his new job. He continued to cheat and lie to clients, so confident in his own skill and intelligence that he failed to realize his wife was lying through her teeth about what she’d been up to each day. She hadn’t held a job since she married him, she’d been bored of working for years, so she was free to spend her days as she liked. She and the neighbor passed the days making love, sometimes arguing, always making up. Their heated tempers collided like meteors even on good days, and to the wife, it kept things interesting. This man, this strong and muscular and hotheaded man was the first man in a long time to truly stave off her boredom. As for the neighbor, he was just glad to find a woman who could match his fire without cowering into ashes. The fact that this woman was someone else’s wife bothered him very little.

Their affair lasted for as long as it could, given the circumstances. She would go to her neighbor’s house, never inviting him to his own. In the neighbor’s house, they would never be caught in the act, there would be no need to wash the sheets in secret. The neighbor didn’t smoke or drink to access, so there were no identifying smells for the wife to worry about concealing. Though their lovemaking was fierce, the woman had the makeup and application skills to hide the marks on her body. And, to completely make sure her husband didn’t suspect anything, she had sex with him, too, whenever he initiated. Despite this, it was a miracle the affair lasted as long as it did.

For the wife had long ago grown bored of birth control.

Truly, the wife didn’t know what to expect, if the child was her husband’s or her lover’s. Not once through the pregnancy did she have any inkling of who it belonged to, and neither did the neighbor. Certainly, the pregnancy was not the same as Virus’s had been, but that proved very little. Every pregnancy was different, and thus every child would be different as well. She hoped this one would not be like Virus, and so did her husband, though they did not express this wish to each other. Virus’s old name had died, for they spoke it no longer, endeavoring to forget that there had been a child before the one she carried now. Another hope the wife kept to herself was the hope that the child was born from her and her husband’s quick nights and not from her and her lover’s long, sweltering days. Not until the moment the baby crowned could she tell who it belonged to.

When the child was born, there was no more guessing. His hair burned as red as the passion between his parents, redder than their combined tempers. The wife’s mind burned with mortification. She was not ashamed to have cheated, but ashamed to have been discovered. She kept her cool, however, and held the baby impassively. The husband noticed the baby’s hair immediately, and he began to feel an anger of his own rise in him, but he too swallowed his feelings down. He let himself seethe as he watched the infant sleep at his wife’s breast. Even after everything, the pair was too proud to let anything slip out of place, and both decided separately, within themselves, that divorce would be too messy.

The baby’s name was not Trip then, but just as Virus lost his old name and became Virus even in the past, Trip’s original name was eventually lost in buried memories and swallowed by time. The embarrassed woman left the hospital with her head held high in spite of it all, and the angry man carried the baby who was not his son into the car and into the crib at home.

Trip was a much more normal child than Virus, at least at first. Really, after everything, it’s a wonder he didn’t become worse. From the beginning, his world was turning on him. His true father was not a coward, but he did not want the child, and moved away more quietly than he had done anything else so far in his life. He left no forwarding address, and the wife had no one who could take her anger properly anymore. The husband continued to work, and lived like all was well and normal and the same as before. So much so that he behaved as though there was no child in his house at all. The wife demanded that he change a diaper or soothe some tears every once in a while, but he was unmoved by her anger, having gotten used to it after Virus’s incident. Trip might as well as had a single mother for all the man who was supposed to be his father did for him.

A baby can let these things slide. A baby, for the most part, can ignore being ignored as long as one person attends to its needs. Trip, for a time, was content with only a mother. But as he grew, he became more aware of the man he lived with, the man who pretended he wasn’t there. He became cognizant of the fact that the man was his father, or at least was meant to be. How would the mother explain the concept of a lover to a child? So, she didn’t bother. Trip didn’t know why his father looked right past him, but he soon felt an overwhelming need to be seen.

Trip was not a bad child, yet, but he was a child who begged and cried and threw fits. The mother had not worked so hard for Virus, she hadn’t needed to. Virus was abnormal. Trip, so far, was normal. As relieved as she was, she couldn’t handle even a normal child sufficiently on her own.

With one parent long gone, one parent who pretended he wasn’t a parent, and one parent spread thin, it was as if Trip had but half a parent to his name.

And what do you do with a half but try to make it a whole?

Trip put on his best behavior. His father didn’t budge. Trip cried nightmare, spilled cereal, lost teddy bears. His father only sighed in his direction. Trip threw toys against the wall, screamed in his mother’s face, beat the ground with tiny fists. His father groaned and left the room. Trip begged to be held, pulled his father’s pant legs, asked for goodnight kisses directly. His father spoke to him then, but only to tell him “no.” Nothing made his father see him for longer than a moment, and Trip settled into angry silence. His true parentage was deep in his bones and his brain, not just plastered in his scarlet hair and evergreen eyes.

Something would eventually have to give. The only question was when.

When Trip entered nursery school, he saw it as an opportunity to improve the relationship with his father. Maybe if he became a good student, he would get some attention. His mother dropped him off on the first day of school, and Trip was ready to succeed. Of course, at that age, there wasn’t much for the children to learn. As with Virus, he was only taught the most basic of skills. But unlike Virus, he seemed to struggle more than the other children, particularly when it came to letters. He had difficulty remembering the sounds they made, and getting them in the right order was another beast altogether. The problem, as was clear to his teacher, was his lack of focus. Even for a child, he was fidgety and difficult to get on task. Even more than that, Trip often seemed not to like learning. As much as he wanted his father’s admiration, school was a bore to him. He found it useless and stupid, and when learning letters proved to require more effort than he’d anticipated, he hadn’t the patience to keep trying.

His relationships with the other students were also less than pleasant. Some of the kids made fun of him for learning so slowly, and the rest formed their own groups without him. Trip tried making friends, but before long, he grew to hate the other children. Just as letters seemed useless to him, so did words. No one listened, whether he asked to be included or to be left alone. Trip stopped talking, and used his hands instead. He pushed and shoved. He pulled toys away from their owners, pulled hair with no regard for its length. At first, the teacher was successful in breaking apart fights, but Trip soon tired of her interference. He offered swings her way whenever she reached out a calming hand. The bullies left Trip alone now, but he still had no friends, so he was still angry. He upped the ante. He shoved and hit. He stole raincoats and lunchboxes. On particularly bad days, he scratched and bit. The children began to fear him. The teacher was at a loss.

She’d tried talking to Trip’s parents, of course. The mother was appalled by Trip’s behavior, and desperately wanted to stop it, lest there be another incident. She had long talks with her son, and she administered punishments when the talks weren’t enough. There was nothing too severe, but that may have been the problem, because nothing resonated in Trip. As much as his mother tried to curb his bad behavior, his father was as passive as ever. Even worse now, he sneered down at the boy who tugged at his pant leg. The parents argued nearly every night. The mother screamed for the man to help her and do something for their son, the man yelled that the child wasn’t worth it. That Trip was not his son remained unspoken, but it hung in the air between them. Its miasma permeated the walls of Trip’s bedroom, sinking through his blanket and settling in his bones while the shouting matches settled in his ears.

Perhaps what really pushed him was that he knew how little he was getting. After all, he saw his mother drop him off at school every day. He also saw some children get dropped off by their fathers. He saw the same fathers pick their children up at the end of each short day. He saw the same fathers hug goodbye and hello, ask their children if they’d had good days. He saw them ruffle hair and kiss scrapes. He saw them marvel at drawings and congratulate each new thing learned. He saw them use one arm for carrying backpacks and one arm for holding hands. He saw them scoop up their children onto their shoulders, he saw them laugh and close their eyes with mirth as their children yelled in excitement. With all the things he saw, he never even saw his own father in the mornings. He left for work before Trip even woke up. His mother had brought it up in many a nightly argument, but his father refused to even offer. He would never be the father who took his son to school in the morning.

It was only a matter of time.

There was a river not so far away from school grounds, and the children were forbidden to go near it. Teachers watched them like a hawk while they were outside for playtime, but it didn’t stop the rowdier kids from trying. The kids who used to bully Trip, and who could now only muster disgusted looks that reminded him of his father, particularly enjoyed sneaking off to the river. And as careful as the teachers on duty were, some teachers slacked off more than others. There were so many children; how could one or two people possibly look after them all? As poorly as Trip was doing at school, he was not stupid. He practically forced himself to be patient, just this once. He had to wait for his opening.

He got it one day when there was only one teacher on duty, and it was one of the lax ones. Only one bully was in that day due to a cold running around the school, but it was the one who led the group, the worst kid of them all. He wasted no time in dashing off towards the river, as Trip knew he would. Trip waited until he was out of sight before following him so as not to attract suspicion. He listened to see if he’d hear that teacher calling him back, but he never did. He walked through the woods, brushing along bushes and stumbling over tree roots. It took some time, but he eventually made it to the river. He saw the other boy there, the bully, throwing rocks into the rushing water. Trip found himself watching the river, too. The churning waves had a hypnotic power to them, and the longer Trip stared, the harder he felt it was to look away. He finally did pull his gaze away from the water to walk towards the bully.

Even Trip wasn’t certain what happened next. He knew from the beginning what he’d wanted, but hadn’t known how to make it happen without risking himself. Even as he approached the bully, he still didn’t have a concrete plan. So it was as strange to him as it was to the bully that the boy ended up in the river.

Maybe not that strange. Trip did push him. Trip had hoped for the rock at the river’s edge to further trip the bully up. Still, though, part of Trip was mystified that he’d reached his goal.

The bully struggled in the water as it slowly carried him upstream. Drowning wasn’t like what Trip had occasionally seen while eavesdropping on the movies his parents watched. In those movies, drowning was a noisy and messy affair. But Trip could hardly hear the bully’s gurgles over the rumbling mutter of the river, could barely see his hands reaching through the frothy waves. Trip followed the river as it carried the boy away.

After a few minutes, the bully came to a stop at a sewer gate. The tunnel beyond the gate was dark, and went farther than Trip could see, as did the river. But the bully didn’t fit through the bars, so Trip could see him clearly. He was already pale, his eyes were half-lidded, mouth open but relaxed. One arm was awkwardly trapped beneath him by the rushing water, and his legs were flush against the bars as the river pushed them. Even having never seen a corpse before, Trip knew he saw one now. Part of him wanted to get a closer look, but he knew he’d likely fall in the river and get trapped if he tried. He instead began to walk back to the playground.

Meanwhile, playtime at nursery school had long ended, and the teacher was frantically making excuses to the other faculty as to why two children were missing. Police were called, and when they arrived, Trip had just finished his slow walk through the woods and entered the playground again. Everyone was relieved to see at least one of the children back safe, and hoped it meant the other was to follow. But those hopes were dashed when the police asked the child where the other boy was.

“He fell in the river,” Trip told them.

After everything, the lie was the easiest part.

~~~

Once they learned that a child had drowned while Trip was missing, the parents knew the truth.

Like Trip’s true parentage, it didn’t need to be spoken. Trip’s mother wrung her hands because she knew. Trip’s father set his jaw in simmering rage because he knew. Trip stood taller than ever and looked up into his father’s eyes because he knew. There was no way the father could go on ignoring his son, Trip thought.

The policemen left, and the family stood together, unsure of how to proceed. The father broke first. He looked down at Trip, eyes glittering with hate. Of course it happened again. Of course it was worse this time.

In the next moment, Trip was on the ground, but he didn’t recall sitting. His cheek stung, and he realized why when he looked up at his father’s hand, still raised.

The long-silent words were spoken.

“You are not my son.”

He turned and stormed into his bedroom. Trip’s mother stared down at the boy, body tightening with an anger more acute than anything her husband had created in her. She had tired of trying to help her child and make things better for him; he clearly had no intention of bettering himself. She followed her husband into the bedroom before she could copy his first action.

Trip remained sitting on the floor. It was at that moment that his heart closed off. After surviving being ignored, shouted over, hurting and killing, it shut down as Trip sat on the rough carpet and mulled over what had just occurred. He expected tears, but none came. His heart couldn’t be bothered to make them. All in his chest and mind were coldness and numbness, wrapping around his tiny body and making a shield too late.

Eventually, Trip got up and went into his own bedroom. The night was silent for the first time in a long time.

~~~

This time, when the strange men knocked on the door, they were expected.

“We aren’t normally sought out,” they said, “People aren’t normally able to track us down at all. We’re very curious as to why you contacted us.”

“It’s our son,” the parents said, “He’s not normal.”

“He’s cruel.”

“He’s angry.”

“He’s a monster.”

Trip watched through a doorway like his brother before him, quietly heating with shame and rage.

“Interesting.” The men were hooked. “We can certainly take him with us, if you’d like.”

“Please do.” The father’s eyes glinted like ice.

“There’s nothing else to be done.” The mother clenched her hands in and out, like a pulsing heart.

Trip went willingly. He knew there was nothing for him in that house anymore.

~~~

It wasn’t until a couple years later that Trip was old enough to be integrated with the older kids. Not that it mattered to him, he’d never had a person he liked in that place so far and he didn’t plan to anytime soon. He’d been Trip for a while now, the memories of his old life burned away with experimentation. His old name had already been syringed out of his bloodstream. This was all he knew, and it was all he expected. Everyone around him registered as rubbed-out outlines, indistinguishable beings that all looked the same. Their feet all plodded like mud and their voices reminded him of televisions static, of chaotic scribbles on paper. He couldn’t tell one face from the next.

But it was when he was made to join the older kids that he met a boy who finally stuck out. He was twice Trip’s age, with blonde hair and a soft jaw that reminded Trip of something he’d long since forgotten. When he met the boy officially, he saw his eyes, blue like the parts of the ocean mankind had yet to explore.

The boy’s name was Virus, and Virus saw something equally interesting and new in Trip. There was something familiar in the shape of his eyes, even if the color was a green he’d never seen before. His demeanor, though, was what Virus truly thought was strange, strange in how it reminded him both of himself and of people he no longer remembered. He’d been in that place for years and the day he meant Trip was the first time he’d ever felt so surprised.

Both boys were drawn to each other in a way neither could explain, so eventually they stopped trying.

They were not friends, family, or lovers, but they were the best the other had ever known.


End file.
